Improved Multi-Size, Multi-Target and 3D Position Detection Network for Flowering Chinese Cabbage Based on YOLOv8

Abstract

Accurately detecting the maturity and 3D position of flowering Chinese cabbage ( Brassica rapa var. chinensis) in natural environments is vital for autonomous robot harvesting in unstructured farms. The challenge lies in dense planting, small flower buds, similar colors and occlusions. This study proposes a YOLOv8-Improved network integrated with the ByteTrack tracking algorithm to achieve multi-object detection and 3D positioning of flowering Chinese cabbage plants in fields. In this study, C2F-MLCA is created by adding a lightweight Mixed Local Channel Attention (MLCA) with spatial awareness capability to the C2F module of YOLOv8, which improves the extraction of spatial feature information in the backbone network. In addition, a P2 detection layer is added to the neck network, and BiFPN is used instead of PAN to enhance multi-scale feature fusion and small target detection. Wise-IoU in combination with Inner-IoU is adopted as a new loss function to optimize the network for different quality samples and different size bounding boxes. Lastly, ByteTrack is integrated for video tracking, and RGB-D camera depth data are used to estimate cabbage positions. The experimental results show that YOLOv8-Improve achieves a precision ( P ) of 86.5% and a recall ( R ) of 86.0% in detecting the maturity of flowering Chinese cabbage. Among them, mAP50 and mAP75 reach 91.8% and 61.6%, respectively, representing an improvement of 2.9% and 4.7% over the original network. Additionally, the number of parameters is reduced by 25.43%. In summary, the improved YOLOv8 algorithm demonstrates high robustness and real-time detection performance, thereby providing strong technical support for automated harvesting management.

Plant phenotyping relevance

開花中国白菜の成熟度という植物状態を画像から検出・推定する改良YOLOv8と3D位置推定手法が研究の中心であり、収穫対象の単なる位置検出を超える。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a custom flowering Chinese cabbage dataset (1016 images, 11,970 targets) and a YOLOv8-Improved model, but no block contains any public deposit, availability statement, or authors' URL for the dataset, images, code, or trained weights. The only URLs present (ultralytics/yolov5, ultralytics/ultralytcs

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